My mum asked me in an email earlier about the Middle East situation. I see no reason to blog about something which is already so well publicised, which is dominating the headlines. I don't see that my own perspective adds much to things either, since I think everyone will just view this according to their own prejudices: the battle lines are already drawn. Islamophobes, Zionists, believers in the clash of civilizations, Israelis: they will by-and-large see things one way. Anti-imperialists, Arabs, Muslims will by and large see things the other. I am of course in the last category.

Erratum: I originally said here that I wished victory to Hizbollah and Hamas. I now recognise that this is absurd. Wishing victory to Hizbollah and Hamas is like wishing success to an anti-capitalist riot in our own countries: there is no success, or rather, the resistance is in itself successful. Hizbollah and Hamas are successful already in standing up for justice. But they cannot win. Hence/Because, this is not a war between Israel and its enemies, but rather a gesture of defiance by the powerless. I hope rather for the survival of Hizbollah and Hamas and the Arab people in general in the face of the assault.

Israel has more than once defeated the full armies of its Arab neighbours. Today it is facing off against a couple of small guerilla forces. Israel has twice the military funding and manpower it used to have, and its enemies have dwindled virtually to nothing. The presence of massive American forces openly in the Middle East further serves to neuter what little pratical opposition the peoples of the region might give. Frankly, given such basic facts, the hysteria present in some press reports about World War IV starting in the Gulf is just that. The notion that this petty resistance to Israel and Israel's massacres in response are something major is based on the continuing distorted perspective of the right, which imagines that the Islamic world is a direct threat to the West, when it is in fact in the process of being ground under the West's heel. People like me, anti-imperialists, aren't people who are indifferent to Islamic expansionism, as the right frequently claim, just as we were not indifferent to Zionist conspiracies in the 19930s. Rather, in neither case do we believe that such phenomena have enough reality to constitute a threat, but rather that the main threat is that of us to them. The fantasy of the repressed group as threatening to their oppressors is a gargantuan exercise in projection which serves to justify the oppression itself.

Insh'allah, Israel's atrocities will awaken the Arab masses, will lead to revolutions in Saudi and Egypt, will see the Iraqi people unite against their crusader overlords. But, as I say, we've seen this shit too many times in the past to be optimistic.